Extreme Makeover - Air America Edition

As mentioned the other day, Air America Radio's new management is looking to make their mark, and part of that is via a new web presence and new logo, in addition to the new schedule that launches next week. And it looks like they've delivered.

Could this be a farewell to those premium links at the bottom of the front page linking to old bits from Marc Maron's show? Or the schedule that still showed Sam Seder filling the midday slot and "The Best of Peter Werbe" on weekends. It looks like they've done gone hired someone to give them some web presence. Well okay, they've still got the ancient audio bits. So nobody's perfect.

According to Mark Green, this is the official beginning of the much-ballyhooed Air America 2.0:

In the past two months, we at Air America Radio have been working hard to re-launch a great idea -- that is, talk radio for progressive patriots...talk radio that's informative, opinionated, entertaining.

This coming Monday/Tuesday, May 21-22, we'll be presenting you -- our loyal listeners, streamers, podcasters -- with a new look, new line-up, and our new blogger on this web site. And we'll let you know exactly when over those two kick-off days our 12 hosts will be interviewing some 30 leading political and public figures in America. People like Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama, like George Stephanopoulos and Chris Matthews, like Robert Redford and Paul Newman (see ad above), like Eliot Spitzer and Mike Bloomberg, like Gloria Steinem and Ted Sorensen (and David Brooks and Ralph Nader). All only on Air America.

Fasten your seat belts. On Monday, you and millions of others officially become Air Americans.

As mentioned previously, the network is revamping the whole schedule, combining, canceling or adding shows to the lineup. Monday will mark the official launch.

Taking a quick browse of the new site, the nice, bold layout grabs immediate attention. And the news headlines on the left are a nice touch. However, glaring omissions stick out like a sore thumb. Staff and listener blogs are sorely missed here, and really are needed if they wish to compete with the likes of Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and Huffington Post (and if they don't do this, they're stupid). Nova M Radio has even moved toward this somewhat. Interactivity is the buzzword for the much-ballyhooed "Web 2.0" as sites like MySpace and YouTube have become significant forces in bringing people together to look at home videos and get friend requests from crappy garage bands. Allegedly, this is all in the works, and the network has even hired their own blogger as well, Nancy Scola.

Links to the individual radio affiliates would be nice, as opposed to just a mere listing (then again, I guess I'm one-up on them in that regard). Or perhaps a current schedule (like they had before), rather than merely links to hosts' individual web pages that are rarely updated.

And a 100% overhaul of their site still needs to be done, since I did actually find Al Franken and Mike Malloy links while doing a quick browse). The site still looks incomplete. Considering how much Green and company want to improve Air America's web presence, perhaps they should hire a good full-time webmaster, if they haven't already.

But overall, not bad. Seeing as how they've carved out a significant presence in the progressive web media, Air America 2.0 would be best served if they looked into implementing Web 2.0.

Oh, and update the "on demand" sound files. June 2006? I mean, come on! How about some free snippets from current shows, like Ed Schultz and his crew are so prompt with? Year-old talk radio shows are rarely entertaining.

This thing still looks like a work in progress. Nonetheless, you can take a look for yourself at airamerica.com. And not to be outdone, Sam Seder, who's new weekend show debuts this Sunday at 4P ET, has overhauled his own site, which you can see here.